Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture:
“A seven-line, handwritten 1922 poem in which Proust said his servant was ‘tall, slender, beautiful,’ may fetch as much as 12,000 euros, Sotheby’s said. A note that he scribbled to her a few hours before dying in 1922, still stained with the coffee he was drinking, could sell for as much as 8,000 euros. “
That “stained” was making me nervous.
The Dark Ages: in celebration of the little black book – Times Online:
“My friend Robin Hunt, who is a research fellow at University College London studying trust in the digital age, e-mails me his thoughts on the phenomenon: ‘The democratisation of the BlackBerry (and the even earlier adoption of the all-tech iPod by the masses and not just the elite) leaves the posing class with nowhere to go except ‘by hand’. I travelled across Europe with Moleskines because sometimes sitting at a café, even with a shiny silver Mac, isn’t enough; you still look like an accountant. Also, writing by hand makes for such concentration of thought.’ Since the original Moleskine has gone, Hunt says that the new version is ‘utterly fake in a sense. You could say it is the riposte to the web.’ “
Ouch. And yet the Web itself has been responsible for the widespread adoption of said riposte. The ‘Skine (YEAH, baby) has become popular enough that its quality has suffered – the paper is crappier and the bindings split easily. There are better and less trendy notebooks out there.
The difference between Hemingway’s Moleskine and yours, though, is that his had Hemingway’s writing in it.
guilds in a time of rapid change:
We are in an era of transformative change. We are 15 years into the web, a decade into the Google Search Era, and only 4 years into Web 2.0
If you’re working on a traditional 5-year planning cycle, that means you’re only three plans since the information environment transformed completely, and your last plan may have been fixed in print before Web 2.0 even existed. These are challenging times.
Tell me about it.
(Via Science Library Pad.)
The money quote from a Consumerist story, about a Shop-Rite that refuses to write “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” on a birthday cake for the spawn of white supremacists:
Young Adolf Hitler Campbell will be getting a cake from Wal-Mart this year.
Color me deeply unsurprised. Incidentally, it’s only the likelihood that this kid’ll be homeschooled that’ll save the poor thing from paying dearly for the stupidity of his parents.
Technorati Tags:
politics, walmart, weird, godwins+law
(Via cul de sac.)
The Phoenix > Books > Review: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer:
Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian — poets, and the most knowledgeable and dedicated Spicereans — have brought together all the known Spicer poems in one place and given American poetry an essential book. Not that Spicer is for the common reader. God forbid. His poetry is like a glass of potent spirits; you don’t always have a taste for it, but when you do, it is the only drink that will do. It’s not easy to like Spicer’s work. He can be cutting, nasty, self-pitying to an extreme, the smartest one in the room, and a masterful, cruel putdown artist. That these are strengths is not paradoxical. Spicer was not interested in paradox. Taking dictation from ‘Martians’ allowed him to get away with murder, and after reading him, you may feel that much American poetry is fake, the quality of its emotions bland as baby food.”
I have the Robin Blaser “Collected Books” (from Black Sparrow) but I’m interested in this edition. Spicer is truly an underappreciated influence in American poetry, akin to Robert Duncan. He can be very difficult. I found the automatic writing angle somewhat uncomfortable when I was younger, but some of Spicer’s poetry is sublime:
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises Tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean Does not mean to be listened to. A drop Or crash of water. It means Nothing. It Is bread and butter Pepper and salt. The death That young men hope for. Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry.
There’s echoes of the various NY Schools in there. There are some really great collected volumes coming out these days. This is one of them.
Technorati Tags:
literature, poetry, spicer
Bookslut | “Beyond This Universe of Countless Wordsâ€:
While some might see this kind of writing as incoherent and lacking focus, the collage extends notions of self, memory, perception, and reflection in ways unique to Whalen’s modernist collage. Significantly, Whalen provides what Kenneth Burke has called ‘strategies for living.’ Such strategies provide readers with a richly textured poem that comments on the force of memory and imagination in the creation of everyday experience. Spiritual and philosophical introspection is often tempered with humorous outbursts of self-awareness, commentary on the concretely situated flesh-and-blood body in space, and historically framed contexts that give meaning to the accident of occasion. Such accidents appear in Whalen’s work in need of redemption from the peculiarities of chance. His work suggests instead that separation is an illusion, that things cohere as experience within a life remembered and continually re-processed and situated in the subtly shifting coordinates we all must ride. Poetry provides an imposed limitation on these phenomenal movements, for it demands translation of perception into a particularly ordered language. Again, in Burke’s terms, Whalen shows us how to expand our capacities of seeing, feeling, and thinking about the world and the particular environments we inhabit.
Particularly perceptive review of Whalen’s work in the the context of the recent Collected Poems. Whalen is by far my favorite of all the Beats. For the most part Whalen seems onto something entirely different than Kerouac Ginsberg Corso et al; his lumping in there is an accident of history.
Technorati Tags:
poetry, literature, whalen, beats
Open Left:: Geez (wondering why Larry Lessig doesn’t support the auto bailout):
I just don’t get this amazing lack of sympathy for working people, or perhaps, the naivete at how politics actually works. Why a $700B bailout for bankers, which produce no obvious product, and not a $14B bridge loan for people that actually make automobiles? No particular reason. Oh, and the market shall provide. It’s really a really remarkable sentiment in this day and age, a sort of tenured ‘let them eat cake’.
Just ask yourself this: which union do most software developers and Internet entrepreneurs belong to? Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Now do you get it?
Technorati Tags:
geek, politics, bailout, auto+bailout,labor, uaw,open+left
Now Playing in New Rochelle, “Book, Interrupted”! | New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound
Students at New Rochelle School High School are going to find it difficult to complete their next assignment: comparing the film adaptation of ‘Girl, Interrupted’ to the best-selling book. In the book, Kaysen recounts her confinement at a Massachussets mental hospital in the 1960’s.
Pages from the middle of the book have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed ‘inappropriate’ by school officials due to sexual content and strong language. Removed is a scene where the rebellious Lisa (played by Angela Jolie in the movie) encourages Susanna (played by Winona Ryder) to circumvent hospital rules against sexual intercourse by engaging in oral sex instead.
‘The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students,’ said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, ‘since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing.’
This is so wrong, on so many levels. I find the casually positive use of “Bowdlerizing” particularly frightening. I live in New Rochelle, my son attends public school here, and this is not a good sign. I’m sending some emails.
Technorati Tags:
libraries, literachoor, politics, banned+books, censorship, 1st+amendment
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